Cloud IT infrastructure sales up 26% says IDC

October 9, 2017

Global vendor revenue from infrastructure products - servers, storage and Ethernet switching - for cloud IT grew 25.8% year-over-year in the second quarter of 2017, reaching $12.3bn, said analyst house IDC.

Western Europe out-performed the cloud IT infrastructure market with a growth rate of 33.4%. Middle East & Africa saw 28.4% growth, and Central and Eastern Europe experienced 16.9%.

That total IDC worldwide figure was for both private and public clouds. IDC said public cloud now represents 70.2% ($8.63bn) of total quarterly cloud IT infrastructure revenue. The market with the highest growth in the public cloud infrastructure space was enterprise storage systems, with revenue up 30.4% compared to the same quarter the previous year, and making up over a third of the revenue in public cloud.

Server and Ethernet switch public cloud IT infrastructure revenues were up 24.6% and 26.8% respectively.

Private cloud infrastructure spending continues to be driven by the server market, which has remained nearly 60% of the revenue in that space for the past 18 quarters.

"The strength in public cloud growth continued at an accelerated pace through the first half of 2017," said Kuba Stolarski, an analyst at IDC. "We have already reported that most of this growth is being driven by Amazon. However, it is important to remember that many of the other hyper-scalers – Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu – are preparing for their own expansions and Skylake/Purley refreshes of their infrastructure.”

IDC said it is still seeing “steady growth” in the lower tiers of public cloud, and “continued growth” in private cloud on a worldwide scale. In combination, it said, these infrastructure growth segments should “more than offset” the decline in sales of traditional IT infrastructure deployments for the “remainder of 2017 and well into next year”.